Blockly in Other Languages

[Austin Ayers]

Hi,

Currently Blockly supports four languages. What steps would I need to take in order to add a new language to that selection? I've been pouring over the files in the generator section and was wondering how I would go about starting this project?

Thanks for your time,

Austin Ayers

[Blake]

Austin,

Assuming you are talking about what Blockly calls "Code Generators" then there are a number of steps required. 

Recently PHP support was added. You can see the changes made in the Pull Request here: https://github.com/google/blockly/pull/98

I'll list them form memory but I hope others can help.

1.  Create:
• blockly/generators/<language>.js
• blockly/generators/<language>/<other files>.js //these are the files that tell blockly how to convert blocks to code
2. Add the language to the build file: https://github.com/google/blockly/blob/master/build.py#L164-L167
3. There is a "standard block set" that all of the current languages implement, the definitions of the the blocks are here https://github.com/google/blockly/tree/master/blocks
4. You can use the Block Factory to generate new types of blocks if needed. https://blockly-demo.appspot.com/static/demos/blockfactory/index.html

I hope this helps you get started.

Blake

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[Mark Friedman]

It's also worth pointing out that there are additional language generators for Blockly that have been implemented by third parties.  So, if you're interested in a particular language it might be worth searching through the Blockly group archives to see if anyone else has already done it.

-Mark

[Austin Ayers]

That does help, thanks! Any other tips are greatly appreciated. I'm fairly new to Blockly, and its applications seem diverse.

[Austin Ayers]

Good idea, unfortunately, I was unable to find the language I'm going to implement. It would have saved me some headache.

[Carlos Pereira]

Out of curiosity, which language is that?

[Burak Bilgehan]

Hi Blake,

Are the steps you wrote enough for making Blockly generate codes in a new language? I mean, we are trying to make blockly for a new domain specific scripting language and we need blockly to generate the codes in this language. By following those 4 steps will the blockly generate codes in our language? How much work needed on it? I've been researching for it and things seem a little complex for me. Many projects for this task coded in different ways, in general you are right, they add a new "blockly/generators/<language>.js" document and "blockly/generators/<language>/" folder. But even though the structures of .js files are similar, they all have different code parts, which makes me don't understand how to fill the codes. Thanks in advance.
Burak

[Zubair Quraishi]

I made a Clojurescript generator if that is of any use to browse the code:

https://github.com/zubairq/yazz/tree/master/resources/public/blockly/generators